


Thanks, Jill

by marzipan (orphan_account)



Series: wrong turn [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Pre-Series, pre-series divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-05 22:31:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16819720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/marzipan
Summary: Mycroft Holmes takes a wrong turn in University one day - straight into the arms of an up-and-coming consulting criminal.





	Thanks, Jill

**Author's Note:**

  * For [problematic_just_because](https://archiveofourown.org/users/problematic_just_because/gifts).



> from tumblr
> 
> @problematic-just-because:  
> I like to believe that Mycroft doesn’t really have much of a moral compass and then in an AU Jim gets to him before the government and of course ~they~ were already watching and when it happens everybody’s freaking out and somebody gets fired because “God, Jill. You’re the one who said we could wait till next month to pull him in and now look. He’s a crime lord.”

It’s a chilly Wednesday when Mycroft takes a left turn instead of right on his way out of the lecture hall. 

Normally he’d, well, schmooze. 

Those moving in the same circle as him were not without influence or connections, and Mycroft considered university more of a stepping stone to what had already been laid out for him as a career in government more than it was a place of study (despite being, at 19, on his way to two masters degrees). 

So it was entirely unusual that that day, instead of meeting up with his regular group to discuss politics and philosophy, he turned toward the library.

This odd piece of trivia about some 13th century war with the French had somehow stuck in his head, and it wouldn’t stop knocking around. It kicked him all the way into the stacks with the broken lighting, where he accidentally walked into another student.

“Oh, excuse me.”

Big brown eyes blinked up at him, and then Mycroft looked down to see the architectural plans for the main building in the other student’s arms. 

And then he was gone.

.

“Wait it out, Harold. Do  _ not _ make contact.”

Harold bites back a sigh and shoves his hands into his trenchcoat pockets. 

“I don’t know, Jill. He may be 19, but he’s awfully full of himself. They tend to be at this age, but he’s smart enough for it to be warranted. What if some private corporation snaps him up?” Harold mutters into the payphone. 

“Then we’ll steal him back,” his boss tells him in her steely, even tone. “And that’s Ms. Cardon to you.”

Interim boss. Until two months ago, Jill had been a colleague. They’d been working the Holmes surveillance together. Then, with the untimely disappearance of Mr. Bailes, Jill had been temporarily promoted.

Truth be told, with all the paranoia permeating the department right now, Harold did not envy her. 

.

The school is abuzz with an embezzlement scandal. 

The Dean was caught taking money, caught during an obscure series of events wherein a fire had caught after a student’s cigarette had dropped into an empty English department room and ended up smoking out the entire wing.

The Dean had run off in the most peculiar direction and ended up running out of a store room with a large bag of money - straight into the journalism students evacuating their rooms. 

The fallout has been spectacular.

With such a sensational event the university had no choice but to let the Dean hang. 

It’s all very public, and then there are countless meetings with donors and trustees to reassure them of how appalled the university is, et cetera, et cetera. 

Mrs. Finley, who seems to be in charge of fundraising, though her official title has something to do with alumni relations, even manages to raise a new endowment which will pay for completely unnecessary renovations to the singed wing, which will then be named after the new donors. 

And if that were not enough, the dean’s wife leaves him, taking the children, and this somehow seems to be the last straw.

On the courthouse steps, the devastated man blurts out this all came to him via a ghost - a phantom who’s taken up housing in the university, who visited him late at his offices. The tabloids chalk it up to an insanity plea, but it strikes Mycroft as an awfully odd thing to say.

The idea kicks around in Mycroft’s head all morning until, out in the courtyard, he runs across into the student from the library. He’s sitting in a little nook looking as upset as if it had been  _ his _ building that’d been burned - and Mycroft finds himself walking up to him.

The boy - a year or two younger than Mycroft himself, perhaps - glances up at him. 

Then it hits Mycroft:  _ The building plans _ .

“You set that fire,” Mycroft says with some wonder, scanning his face. He looks bored, even with the accusation. “You knew about the embezzlement, somehow, and decided to go about this completely roundabout way...I don’t understand.”

That just makes him scrunch up his eyebrows and take another look at Mycroft. 

“Because  _ I _ helped him embezzle that money,” he says, and scowls.

Somewhere in the distance, a crow caws.

Mycroft’s sure he heard right. Still - 

“I’m sorry, you helped him…?”

“Steal the money, yes.”

Mycroft processes the information front to back and still can’t make sense of it. Rather, he could make sense of it, but common sense is trying to get in the way.

“And you’re telling me this, why?” Mycroft asks.

He rolls his eyes.

“Because you have no proof and it’s not like you can do anything about it anyway,” he says, hopping down from his makeshift perch and storming away.

.

Mycroft tracks the other student down on the way to class and slides into the seat beside him during a mathematics lecture.

“Jim Calahan,” he says, and Jim glares at him.

“Or at least that’s what your enrollment papers say, despite the fact that Jim Calahan has been dead for over a decade.”

“What do you want?” He looks Mycroft up and down with hateful scrutiny. “You’re an international politics major, aren’t you? Do you fancy yourself a lawmaker now?”

“You orchestrated this entirely showy way of exposing the dean, who you’d put up to stealing the money in the first place. From what I can tell, it was merely a whim,” Mycroft says, quiet enough to just “Jim” to hear.

“And so what?” Jim asks, still sulking.

“Oh, you wanted to be caught, didn’t you?” Mycroft says, an epiphany. “I see - you advised him on a whim, he was an easy mark, I understand. But it was too easy, and you needed a second act.”

Jim just stares ahead, looking a bit rueful.

Mycroft is surprised at the reaction.

“Not as fun a hobby you expected, then?”

“Aren’t you exhausted with it all?” Jim asks, just as quiet.

Mycroft thinks on it. No, not particularly. He had plans. He was buoyed by ambition.

That wasn’t true - he was often exhausted by the smallness of others.

“Huh,” Mycroft says, sitting back in his seat. 

They watch the lecture in existential silence.

.

“You know,” Mycroft says to Jim as they leave the lecture hall. “Perhaps you were just thinking too small.”

Jim shoots him an annoyed look and pulls him into the hallway.

“Explain,” he demands.

“See, imagine if the dean  _ had _ gotten away with it,” Mycroft says. Jim rolls his eyes.

“Someone must eventually discover the funds had evaporated, and then even if someone suspected the dean, if you had done this right -”

“-which I  _ did. _ ”

“-yes but then if you had done it right, he might have been suspected, but there would never have been any evidence.”

“What is your  _ point _ Holmes?”

“My point is that it would have been a horribly effective way of advertising your services.”

Jim stops in his tracks, and Mycroft nearly runs into him.

“It would have been obvious to anyone  _ really _ looking that he had help,” Mycroft says, and Jim turns around slowly, to look up at him.

“So, like, a business,” he says.

“Something like it.” Mycroft says. “Solely an advisory position, of course.”

“Of course.”

The idea clearly interests Jim, because Mycroft can practically see the gears whirring away his head behind those eyes. 

“I,” Jim starts tentatively. “I had a trucker I was working on…”

He looks searchingly at Mycroft again, as if trying to determine how much he could stomach.

“Come on,” he says suddenly, grabbing Mycroft by the wrist and dragging him off.

“Where?!”

.

“So,” Jim says, the two of them crowded over a table in his dorm room. “He’s someone with the means to get into some weapons trafficking - I’d been working on him ever since I helped fake some papers for a shipment of imports.”

Mycroft raises an eyebrow, which Jim ignores. 

“He’s wary, because he’s not mob affiliated. But he’s been transporting things for ages, and is in a good position for it.” Jim bites his lip. Then he blinks up at Mycroft with those big, round eyes. 

“And…” Mycroft finds himself tracing a route on the map instead of telling Jim any of his misgivings. “If he takes advantage of your advance knowledge of the other shipment schedules, he could get through without trouble. Even corner the market, should something happen to those other schedules…”

Jim grins up at him. 

“You’re a bit terrible.”

“Only a bit.”

“But how do you let our man come out on top  _ without _ putting a target on his back?”

Mycroft crosses his arms. “I’d say that it’s his problem, but that would defeat the purpose of trying to drum up business now, wouldn’t it? Let’s only target one of the groups then, and make it look like it came from someone else.”

.

“He um, he skipped his economics lecture today, Jill,” Harold says, looking over his shoulder in the phone booth.

“You’re only supposed to call when you have developments  _ worth reporting _ ,” Jill says. 

“No but, it’s weird because he’s  _ such _ a stickler for routine,” Harold hisses. “And I couldn’t find him anywhere. He’s up to something.”

“You’re paranoid, Harold.”

“I’m not - he doesn’t do things without a reason, so if he’s hiding, it’s for a reason.”

“Hiding!” Jill laughs.

“He was with  _ none _ of the people he’s usually with.”

“Harold, I’m hanging up now.”

“No - no,  _ Jill. _ ”

.

Even as they’re crowded together in Jim’s dorm, mapping out routes and timing heists down to the second, Mycroft knows this is something he shouldn’t be doing. 

Not only is it  _ so _ far from the life plan he’s had laid out for him, but he could very well end up complicit should Jim ever decide to talk. It would be far from an airtight case, of course, as the two of them were quite clear about staying away from any actions they could be charged for. 

But his mere involvement could damage his character - if not publicly, at least to the point where he’d never hold the government post he was meant to. 

Jim slams his hands on the table suddenly, and looks up in epiphany.

“I have something to show you,” he says, before ducking under the desk and hurriedly rummaging through the drawers.

Jim is a bit weird like that.

He remerges a moment later with a flier, which he slaps on the desk and Mycroft picks up.

“Art exhibition,” Mycroft says. It’s a recently restored Vermeer; Mycroft remembers it being in the news a while back when the painting had first been recovered. “You want to steal it?”

“ _ Replace _ it,” Jim corrects. “The restorer is  _ up to his eyes _ in debt. I think he could be amenable.”

“And you just need to find a buyer,” Mycroft says when Jim trails off. He nods. “I’m sure the board isn’t free of corruption.”

Jim grins again. “There we go.”

.

The two of them sit in a park across from the gallery a few weeks later, eating sandwiches, because Jim seems to nurture odd habits.

“You know, the point of remaining consultants is so our hands stay clean,” Mycroft says, causing Jim to lick crumbs off his fingers at his words, because he’s kind of a little shit like that. “Returning to the scene of the crime is a terribly silly thing to do.”

“How else am I supposed to measure how well we’re pulling this off?” Jim scowls. “The jobs have to be  _ so good _ that we could walk straight into the scene while it’s taking place and still go  _ completely _ unnoticed.”

Mycroft just gives him a very flat look. 

Then he sighs and sits back.

“We just need to keep busy, that’s all. Then you won’t have the compulsive need to keep checking back on things that have already been neatly tied up. We’ve been here three times in the past two weeks and the sandwiches from the corner deli are really subpar. We just need to advertise.”

“Yes, let’s just put an ad in the paper why don’t we,” Jim grumbles.

Something clicks.

“Well, why not?” Mycroft asks. “Let’s take out an ad.”

.

They start with syndicated crime.

A rumor here, a rumor there, and suddenly the Family thinks there is a usurper amongst their ranks. 

There is. And then when he succeeds - the word is he had help.

After a series of successes, the rumor takes on a life of its own, and soon everyone in the crime world knows about said “help.”

Jim blinks rapidly as he reads an article in the paper about the Family’s untamed growth.

“When you said  _ take out an ad _ I must have misheard you, because I didn’t think you meant  _ take out _ a  _ guy _ named  _ Ed, _ ” Jim says. 

Mycroft shrugs, neatening up a stack of papers. “It’s good to have a roster of clients on retainer; it makes for stable business.”

Jim snorts with a laugh.

“You’re so serious about this, it’s hilarious.”

“I’m glad you think so,” Mycroft says drily. Of course he’s serious. If he’s going to do something, he’s going to do it  _ well. _

Jim claps his hands on Mycroft’s cheeks and they’re cold enough to make him flinch. He leans in.

“It’s  _ adorable _ .”

.

“Shit.” 

Jill leans over the sink in the ladies, letting the water run. Fuck the sewer system. Fuck water conservation. Her career was going straight down the drain.

_ “Shit.” _

.

“Jill, I  _ told you _ ,” Harold hisses, the two of them huddled at the end of the hall outside the conference room. She had updates to present about their most likely candidates, and now their top would-be recruit seemed to have gone off the rails, with his odd activity  _ suspiciously _ corresponding to a spike of unsolvable crime in the city.

“Fuck. Fuck, I _know_ ,” Jill bites out. “Tell me something I can use to fix it.”

Harold paces, shaking his head. “I - I don’t know. We could shoot his partner.”

“Par - he has a  _ partner? _ ” Jill grabs Harold by the collar and bodily shakes him. “Who the fuck got to him before we did? You never reported him being recruited by any other group!”

“He wasn’t! He was the one who did the - the recruiting. Sort of.”

_ “Sort of?”  _ Jill sounds hysterical, and Harold thinks maybe now is not the best time to be shushing her despite the fact that they should really shush.

“He’s sort of moved out of his dorm room - well he still has it. But he’s not  _ using _ it. Anyway he’s sort of moved in with a student a year under him and they have been meeting up an awful lot.”

Jill stares.

“The fact that he’s gay isn’t going to save my career, Harold, good lord, you think our bosses actually care about that shit?”

“What? No! I meant literal meetings! They’re hiding something! Probably Ed Smith’s body!”

Jill’s eyes glaze over, and she loosens her grip on Harold, her hand dropping to her side lifelessly.

“Fuck,” she says, barely audible.

“What is it?”

“He’s pulling the strings.”

“Yes, maybe.”

“I take my eye off the boy for two months, and he becomes a crime lord.”

.

The two of them lean against the balcony railing, bundled in overcoats, people watching.

Jim points to a sad looking straggler in the crowd.

“I bet he’s capable of murder.”

Mycroft’s eyebrows go up, intrigued. 

“Oh?”

“Mm-hm, terminal illness. Divorced, and not happier for it. Probably in debt. Shit job. Dormant temper. Just needs something to push him over the edge.”

Mycroft pushes himself up from the railing and stares at Jim.

“That’s brilliant.”

Jim blinks, taken aback. “It’s - um. Sure. You could’ve told that too.”

Mycroft grabs him by the shoulders.

“No, no, you see, if we could find a way to, at scale, predict those likely to commit crimes in the first place and then approach  _ them,  _ it saves us the trouble of having to keep organizing these showy heists hoping to attract attention! After all, most people who commit crime aren’t looking for anything ostentatious. Oh, Jim, this opens up a whole other client base.”

Jim’s face does something weird where he’s trying not to smile and trying not to turn red, and he rubs his nose and looks away.

“That sounds like something creepy out of a government surveillance gone wrong sci-fi story,” Jim says.

“You don’t think we can do it?” Mycroft frowns.

“Oh, I didn’t say that.”

.

They fall asleep at the table a few nights after that, working on their surveillance scheme. The tough part will be getting someone on their side from the government.

Mycroft wakes up with a  _ thwap _ to his head, and looks up to see Jim, bleary-eyed, holding yesterday’s rolled up tabloid.

“Sleep,” he says. “Bed.”

Mycroft nods.

Four hours later he wakes up cocooned in a duvet and his partner in crime.

.

It takes Mycroft a few more days to realize it’s become a regular occurance. He’s long since stopped spending time in his own room, though up until recently he had still tried to sleep and shower there every day. 

But now, with his hands in Jim’s hair and teeth on his bottom lip and Jim pressed against him on the bed, it seems kind of obvious that the relationship’s, well, progressed.

Mycroft decides he can think about that later, as he kisses along Jim’s jaw before moving down to his throat. He leaves a set of teeth marks on Jim’s shoulder, then blinks in surprise as he discovers the tip of what seems to be an ugly scar on Jim’s back, peeking out from his disheveled shirt. 

He lets his fingers ghost over it, and Jim shivers, but doesn’t pull away. If anything, he seems even more intent on getting Mycroft undressed now.

.

“Mm - Jim.”

Jim’s breath is hot against his neck. They really should get up now, but neither of them want to at all.

“It’s James Moriarty,” he says.

Mycroft looks down at him. 

“My name,” he says again. “There aren’t any papers.”

“James,” Mycroft says, just to try it, and Jim presses closer.

“No, I like Jim. Keep calling me that.”

.

It’s nearly midnight and the office is empty. 

Jill sighs; the cardboard box on her desk is filled with knick-knacks and office supplies.  _ Crap _ she doesn’t really need. She needs to  _ vacate _ it all anyway.

Jill picks up a small potted plant, and a blackened leaf falls off. It’s really dead. She hasn’t used this desk in three months, busy playing interim chief of the department and running herself ragged trying to keep up in meetings. 

_ “Fuck.” _

.

SOME MONTHS LATER

Harold sits in a dim conference room and squirms. He doesn’t understand why his associates feel the need to be all cloak and dagger even with department update meetings.

He picks up a pen and fiddles with it, missing what all the clambering is about when Lady Smallwood, head of MI6, strides into the room.

“This  _ Spider _ , what have we got on him?” she says without greeting.

Dandridge scrambles to flip the presentation to the right side, and Gresham practically throws himself out of his chair to make room for her. 

“Um, these are all the crimes we think he’s connected to,” Dandridge fumbles. “No proof though, but a similar elegance in execution-”

“Elegance?”

Dandridge throws Harold under the bus, pointing the laser straight at him.

Harold drops the pen to his lap.

“What? Um, yes. The only reason we even know these are connected is because of a, well, let’s call it a certain panache in execution. Not so much a calling card, but there is a lot of multitasking happening here, two crimes in one, pitting organizations against each other, that sort of thing.”

Smallwood pinches her mouth.

“Ah yes, he’s making a joke out of London law. And who have we put on this case?” 

“Bradstreet and Nicholls,” Dandridge says helpfully, regretting it immediately when Smallwood rolls her eyes and feels a migraine coming on. He rushes to add, “And our brightest new recruits in analysis.”

“Oh?”

“Newberry, Williams,”

“Holmes?”

Dandridge freezes. Harold tries to shrink down in his chair.

“N-no, that one sort of...didn’t pan out,” Dandridge says.

“Didn’t pan out?” Smallwood laughs. “I knew his uncle. The old man wouldn’t stop talking to him. Is he around? Actually, just bring him in, I want to see what he says.”

It’s uncomfortably silent. Harold scratches his nose with the pen. 

“Well?” Smallwood asks.

“See, Jill Cardon-” Dandridge starts.

“We think Holmes might be Spider,” Harold says. Smallwood turns an incredulous expression toward him and Dandridge is turning a really funny color. Gresham tries to hide under the table. 

“Come again?”

“He and his...partner.”

Smallwood stares at him so hard that Harold wishes he had the foresight to hide under the table as well.

“Goddammit, Jill,” Dandridge says, under his breath, but not quietly enough, dragging his hand down his face.

.

“Mornin’ Michael,” a plump, motherly woman says as she passes his desk with a little wave.

“Ah, good morning, Veronica.” Mycroft smiles, folding his hands in front of him at his desk, and she laughs.

“I hope you’re settling in alright. We’ve never had an IT department before, but now that all these bank records are being put into the computers, on those disks? Well. And you kids know all about them, don’t you?”

“I’m just here to see Mr. Sutton, is he in?”

“No, I’m afraid not. I can give you a ring when he is, though?”

“That would be lovely, dear.”

.

At 12’ noon, Mycroft passes Veronica’s desk on his way out to lunch.

“Oh, are you meeting that lovely boy again?”

He allows himself to blush and look a bit bashful, before nodding and ducking out the door to do just that, heading over to the cafe down the block where Jim’s already seated.

“Hello,” Mycroft says, without dropping his clumsily cheerful persona, bumping into the person behind their table as he tries to take a seat. “Oh, I am  _ so _ sorry.”

He manages to wriggle in, and tangles his feet between Jim’s, who is trying not to laugh into his coffee.

“Don’t laugh, I’ve good news,” Mycroft says. Jim quirks an eyebrow. “The algorithm works.”

Jim sets down his coffee.

“People come in and out of the bank branch at all hours, and the footage is just perfect,” Mycroft murmurs into his own drink. “And what a happy coincidence it that the bank records act as a wonderful profiling database. Can’t wait for you to see it.”

Jim rubs his foot against Mycroft’s ankle.

“Maybe you should show me,” he says. “How long is your lunch break?”

.

EPILOGUE?

Harold opens his eyes and immediately regrets it, blinking rapidly before squinting against the light.

A young man with a gentle looking face and doe eyes stares back at him, and he almost wants to ask if he’s lost or something before that mouth curves up into a cold, mocking smile.

“Hi Harold,” he says, all sing-song.

“Uhh.” Shit. Interrogation training. Right. He closes his mouth-

-and it promptly drops open again when a second figure steps out from behind the first man, and he sees Mycroft Holmes.

“Apologies that our first meeting happened under such circumstances, but as you’ve already spent a couple of years monitoring me, I’d say it’s safe to skip the pleasantries. We have a little request,” Mycroft says.

Harold blanches. 

Goddammit, Jill. 

**Author's Note:**

> think about it!! mycroft could have so much fun organizing crime!!


End file.
